THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 3, 2016
39
when she was eighteen, and went to school
in Nebraska. "I thought, What is this?"
she remembered. "It was like 'Green
Acres.' " As she served noodles, she said,
"We came from eleven children."
"That number is always changing,"
Wong said, feeding Mari spoonfuls of
mashed taro root.
"Well, there were fourteen births all
told," her uncle clarified; several of the
siblings died as infants or children. In
"Baby Cobra," Wong talks about hav-
ing a miscarriage eleven weeks into her
first pregnancy: "My mom, she's from a
Third World country, and when I told
her I had one she was, like, 'Uh, yeah,
where I'm from that's like losing a pair
of shoes.' "
After college, Tammy married Adol-
phus Wong, a Chinese-American anes-
thesiologist, and they raised four children
in Pacific Heights, a picturesque neigh-
borhood in San Francisco. Ali is the
youngest by a decade: her two sisters are
stay-at-home moms; her brother is an
acupuncturist whom she describes as a
"Chinese George Costanza---he's always
got some side hustle going." I asked
Tammy if her youngest daughter had al-
ways been funny. "I don't know," she re-
plied. "I had four kids. So I was busy."
I shooting the new sit-
com---"American Housewife," about
a stay-at-home mother trying to adjust
to life in Westport, Connecticut---and
writing for "Fresh O the Boat" and get-
ting up at five-thirty to breast-feed,Wong
goes out most nights, after she and Ha-
kuta put Mari to sleep by singing "Baby
Beluga" in unison, to perform at local
clubs. She doesn't announce these gigs
to her fans, because, for her purposes, the
fewer spectators there are at these shows
the better. "If the audience is really shitty,
you feel free to just blurt things out," she
told me. "That's the only way I write:
onstage." She estimated that out of every
ten gigs maybe one yields a new nugget
that she can use. "I'm always chasing
that," she said.
After the bánh tráng, Wong drove half
an hour from her house to Pancho's, a
place in Manhattan Beach that is part
Mexican restaurant and part music-and-
comedy club. There were about a dozen
people in the audience, mostly male, in-
cluding a table of four very bu guys in
tight T-shirts. "You all into gel and ket-
tlebells?" Wong asked them from the
stage. She was wearing a brown jump-
suit that she had put on earlier because
it was convenient for breast-feeding.
"Did you guys all see each other and say,
'We should hang out, because our arms
look the same'?"
They laughed at everything she said,
which was striking, because so much of
it had to do with things that supposedly
make men squeamish. Like giving birth:
"They put up this curtain so your hus-
band can only see your human side and
not your cadaver side." And rage. "My
husband occasionally changes diapers
and people can't believe it---'What a dot-
ing father!' " Wong shouted. "I was doing
skin-on-skin contact with my baby girl
to bond with her: she shit on my chest.
Where's my trophy at?"
Wong can get away with a consider-
able amount of vulgarity---and holler-
ing---because she is funny, but it also
helps that she uses her di erences, as she
put it, to destabilize her audience's ex-
pectations. "The archetype that gets pro-
jected onto us as Asian women of being
silent---she really does go against that,"
Margaret Cho told me. Sometimes, when
Wong wants to find out if a ri is good,
she'll deliver it in a soft voice, a kind of
monotonic stage whisper, because then
if people laugh she knows that they are
responding to the material and not to
her crackling energy. More often, she is
almost screaming at the audience---mix-
ing enthusiasm and outrage in a kind of
delighted tantrum.
At Pancho's, Wong began question-
ing one of the muscular friends, who was
Asian, about his romantic life. "I bet white
chicks love you," she said. "You're like an
exotic . . . fish. You're like a bu bird."
He said he was out looking to meet some-
one, and asked for her number. "I have
a C-section scar, bro!" Wong howled. "I
haven't showered in like a week! If you
think that's hot---and you got money
and you know how to commit and you're
good with children---maybe!"
In the car on the way to her next ap-
pearance, Wong told me that, in fact, she
had not had time to shower in five days,
since she stayed overnight at a hotel in
Dallas for a gig and was fleetingly free
of maternal responsibility. "The telltale
giveaway is when I have my hair like
this." It was in two French braids that
graduated into pigtails. She looked sur-
prisingly clean. "It's an art," she said.
We were in Wong's new RAV , her
only splurge after her recent success. She
was giving her mother her old Toyota
Corolla, which, as she said in "Baby
Cobra," has a "huge bear-claw scratch
on the side from this aggressive brick
"The arms wouldn't be so noticeable if he'd stop playing air guitar."
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